Volumes & issues:

This article presents an analysis of some phraseological units, conversational routines, according to their independence degree, in order to restructure Sphere III (Corpas, 1996). In this Sphere there are also proverbs and idioms. In an attempt to classify Spanish phraseological units, we have taken as a model the system proposed by Briz and Val.Es.Co. Group (Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co., 2003, 2014) for conversational segmentation. This system characterizes some statements in terms of different degrees and types of independence, which allow us to restructure Sphere III. This paper adopts a phraseological and pragmatic approach, with examples taken from Corpus de conversaciones coloquiales (Briz & Grupo Val.Es.Co., 2002).

This is a perceptual study on the production of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa in word final position at discourse level. It is intended to find out whether the speaker’s gender, accent, speech rate and emphasis placed upon words have any bearing on the production of this alternation. The effect the aforementioned factors may have on the production of this apparently anarchic phonetic alternation demands further exploration (see, however, O’Shaughnessy, 1981; Byrd, 1994; Wells, 1995; Töft, 2002). The informants for this study were 80 non-rhotic native newsreaders (40 males and 40 females) taken from the BBC learning English website (2009). Three female listeners not knowledgeable about the purposes of the study had to decide whether they perceived a syllabic consonant in certain words (800 overall) or not. Results show that there is a statistically significant relationship between each of these factors and the production of English syllabic consonants vs. schwa.

This study examined patterns of perceived strategy use among prospective Spanish primary teachers of English and the relationship between those strategies and the prospective teachers’ English proficiency. A total of 116 student teachers were administered the Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) version 7.0 (ESL/EFL). The Oxford Placement Test was used to obtain a measure of proficiency in English. Descriptive statistics, a post hoc thematic analysis and Spearman correlation coefficients were used to analyze the data. The results showed that the participants were medium-to-high strategy users overall and that they reported using metacognitive strategies and those relating to understanding most frequently, while memory and affective strategies were used least frequently. According to the self-reported study data, the most frequently-used individual strategy involved paying attention to language whereas the least-used strategy involved writing down feelings in a learning diary. Findings indicate a generally low correlation between strategy group scores and English proficiency. In addition, there is no significant correlation between the SILL and proficiency scores; however, when the low-use strategies are not computed for the measure of frequency of language learning strategy use, a significant positive correlation is found between self-reported frequency of strategy use and proficiency.

Even though the Common European framework of reference for languages has placed great emphasis on the teaching and learning of oral aspects and there is general agreement about the need to analyze oral competence development through checklists, the inventories developed so far to analyze textbooks are too general, not explicit enough or devote too little space to oral skills. Consequently, there is currently no specific instrument created to evaluate how oral competence is being fostered in English as a Foreign Language textbooks. This paper aims at filling this gap in research by presenting a tool to analyze oral skills development in EFL course books. The checklist was divided in four sections named background information, listening, speaking, and pronunciation, and included quantitative and categorical measures. The tool is presented in an abridged and an extended version to allow for a shorter and a more detailed scrutiny. A preliminary analysis using it showed a highly significant and excellent inter-rater agreement of 0.995 for numerical items and of 0.907 for categorical ones.

The present article is concerned with the analysis of so-called metaphoric resemblance operations. Our corpus of animal metaphors, as representative of resemblance metaphors, reveals that there are complex cognitive operations other than simple one-correspondence mappings that are necessary to understand the interpretation process of the selected expressions (which include metaphor and simile). We have identified a strong underlying situational component in many of the examples under scrutiny, which requires the metonymic expansion of the metaphoric source. Additionally, metaphoric amalgams (understood as the combination of the conceptual material from two or more metaphors) and high-level metonymy in interaction with low-level metaphor are also essential for the analysis of animal metaphors.

The current study builds on research on mood distinction in Spanish, which has focused on the subjunctive mood, by examining the full inventory of verb forms that second-language learners and native speakers (NSs) of Spanish use in mood-choice contexts. Twenty NSs and 130 learners corresponding to five proficiency levels completed three oral-elicitation tasks. The results show that participants use a wide repertoire of tense/mood/aspect forms in mood-choice contexts and that NSs and learners use largely the same forms. An analysis of the conditional and imperfect suggests that learners tend to restructure and strengthen their form-function connections between these verb forms and a range of functions.

This paper analyses three B1-level textbooks used in EFL in Spain to gather information about how culture is taught, given that language learning and culture learning are closely related. A model of culture learning based on previous work by Paige, Jorstad, Paulson, Klein, and Colby (1999) and Lee (2009) has been designed in order to examine the textbooks’ cultural content. This functional framework gathers every theme and aspect of culture needed to develop each of the competencies that are required to accomplish an integrated language and culture learning, i.e., to achieve intercultural communicative competence as the ultimate goal of language learning. Findings show that the invisible aspect of culture (small “c” target-culture learning), which is crucial to understanding the values and ways of thinking of a society, was neglected in all three textbooks. Thus, despite some promising changes in the way of addressing culture learning in EFL textbooks, we are still far from developing intercultural speakers.

Sight translation is widely used in the T&I classroom as a pedagogical tool to enhance trainees’ acquisition of interpreting skills and as a communicative tool to prepare trainees for the translation market. Sight translation, as a separate course, or at least as a necessary component of an interpreting course, is increasingly visible in most T&I programs. However, the pedagogy of sight translation is a rarely touched upon topic in the current literature. This article discusses the design of a sight translation course as a stepping stone for interpreting courses in an undergraduate program. Graves’ (2000) course development model is adapted to serve as the framework of course design. Drawing on findings from previous research, the author describes the five initial elements of course design: context definition, articulation of beliefs, content conceptualization, goals and objectives formulation, and course organization. This article aims at inspiring fellow trainers to design sight translation courses and other T&I courses in a scientific and systematic way.

The need to function in multilingual environments and the fact that study abroad (SA) is believed to be one of the most efficient language learning contexts (Collentine, 2009) have boosted the popularity of SA programs. While numerous recent studies have examined the SA impact on oral fluency, vocabulary or writing, among others, certain areas, such as listening skills (Llanes, 2011), have yet to receive substantial attention. In an attempt to address this issue, a pretest-posttest design study was conducted to gauge the listening skills of 12 college students at the beginning and the end of a 5-week SA experience in Costa Rica. Results from non-parametric tests revealed that despite the brief duration of the program, participants’ overall listening comprehension improved significantly. Individual analysis revealed that significant gains emerged in exit tasks in which the topic of conversation was kept consistent, suggesting that contextualization plays a crucial role in input comprehension.

This article evaluates the way 46 students of a university ‘Spanish as a second language’ blended course used the virtual resources available for learning language and culture, and the students’ ratings of the contribution of those technological resources and tools to their learning. Results showed students perceived vocabulary, cultural contents, grammar and receptive skills as the ones benefitting the most from the use of technologies. The students also mentioned many of the strengths and weaknesses of the blended learning methodology, which have already been mentioned by other authors. Our analysis may serve as empirical evidence for the design of courses based on this model.

This paper analyzes the properties of the image as a tool for the description of grammar phenomena and peeks into its pedagogical potential through an application to the controverted dichotomy between ser and estar in Spanish. The use of visual language as a device for the analysis and presentation of grammar has been one of the Cognitive Linguistics’ most characteristic traits. Nevertheless, the application of this powerful tool in the Spanish Language classroom is still scant, despite the description potential that the experts grant to it. This paper shows an analysis of some approaches to ser and estar through Cognitive Grammar and the metalinguistic image, and proposes another possible interpretation based in those principles and aiming to be exportable to the Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom.

The present study aimed at investigating the impact of textual enhancement on the comprehension of transparent and opaque English idioms among Spanish lower-intermediate students studying English as a foreign language. Two short texts including visually enhanced idioms (i.e., they were underlined) were designed for the Experimental Group, and the Control Group received an unenhanced version of the texts. The results reveal that textual enhancement made transparent idioms salient enough for them to have an impact on comprehension; however, underlining had a poorer effect on comprehension as far as opaque idioms are concerned. In addition, we aimed at examining the effect of textual enhancement on the noticing of idioms. Findings show that it did not have a positive effect on recognition of idioms, since the Control Group outperformed the Experimental Group in the multiple-choice task.

It seems that children are born with sophisticated abilities to perceive speech sounds. Phonological short-term memory plays a key role in the process of language acquisition in the storage of unknown phonological forms while more permanent representations are stored in the long-term memory.In this paper we present the results of a study on the influence of two factors in the short-term memory: the degree of perceptibility (phonetic prominence) and the type of syllable structure (structural prominence) of the stimuli used. The results showed a larger influence of the latter at the expense of the amount of phonetic substance. This reinforces the importance of the role of syllabic structure in the early stages of language acquisition, used as a clue for learning the stress rules on speech and, subsequently, in the process of learning how to read.

This article explores teachers’ perceptions on the cultural and intercultural dimension in the teaching of French as a Foreign Language for beginners. Based on the correlations found between the educational and cultural profile of each French language teacher and their answers to a semi-structured interview concerning their vision of the culture and its importance in level 1, this paper argues that the most important variables for promoting intercultural teaching and for developing intercultural competence, are the teachers’ intercultural experience, a good knowledge of the target culture as well as of the learner’s culture, and a multidisciplinary training on social disciplines. The study also shows the need for both learners and teachers to work on their own implicit culture, since a lack of distance with regard to their own cultural references is a handicap for carrying out intercultural work in the classroom.

An emic perspective, or insiders’ perspective, has been widely employed in social interactionism-inspired qualitative studies. This view claims that any interactional behavior can be examined from within the system. Applied to research in which talk is central, this view requires data to come from the participants who are involved in the talk because they document their social actions to each other within the details of their interaction. Researchers can access the perspective by adopting the same perspective as the participants. As a result, the findings yield high internal and ecological validity. Following this perspective, this study, which explores silence, or, to be more specific, gap, in institutionalized talk, demonstrates how interactional data is produced and analyzed by the participants as the talk emerges. This study shows that an emic view allows researchers to indirectly involve participants in the analysis and can be an alternative potential tool in descriptive communication research.